The Two Debtors and the Woman at Simon’s House (17 of 26)

The parable is four sentences long and it is not the point of the scene.

It sits inside a story about a dinner, and the dinner is where the argument happens. Once you see what Simon did not do, the whole exchange changes.

What Courtesies Did Simon Omit?

All three that a host owed a guest of standing.

Jesus lists them at the end and the list is the accusation. No water for the feet. No kiss of greeting. No oil for the head.

Those were not optional flourishes. They were the ordinary marks of welcome, and omitting one might be an oversight. Omitting all three is a message, delivered in front of other guests, and everyone in the room would have read it.

Simon invited Jesus to his table and then withheld every sign that he was welcome at it. He wanted the association without the honour.

What Does the Woman Do?

Supplies all three, and at greater cost than the originals.

Water for the feet becomes her tears. The kiss of greeting becomes her kissing his feet, which is the posture of someone claiming nothing. The oil for the head becomes ointment poured on his feet.

Every omission of Simon’s is answered, item for item, by a woman who had no standing in that house at all.

She also lets down her hair in public, which in that culture was a serious act and not a decorous one. Bailey does not treat it as a lapse. She is doing the only thing available to her with the only resources she has.

What Is the Parable Actually Saying?

That two men owed money and both were forgiven, and the one who owed more loves more.

Simon answers correctly, and the answer convicts him. He has just conceded the principle that the size of the forgiveness governs the size of the response.

Then Jesus turns to the woman and delivers the list of what Simon did not do.

Bailey’s reading of the whole exchange is that it clarifies two kinds of sinner. Simon is a law-keeper and the woman is a lawbreaker, and both are in debt. The parable does not deny that Simon owes something. It denies that he knows it.

Does She Love Because She Is Forgiven, or Is She Forgiven Because She Loves?

That is a real translation question and it matters.

The sentence can be read either direction, and readers have argued about it for a long time. The parable that Jesus has just told settles it. In the story the debts are cancelled first, and the love follows as a response.

So the woman is not purchasing anything with her display. She is responding to something already received, and her behaviour at the dinner is evidence rather than payment.

What Does It Say About Prophets?

That Simon and Jesus have opposite definitions.

Simon’s private thought is that if this man were a prophet he would know what kind of woman is touching him and would avoid her. On that view a prophet’s holiness consists of distance.

Jesus proves he knows exactly who she is, by reading Simon’s unspoken thought and then addressing her situation directly. And he does not withdraw.

Bailey’s summary is the sharpest line available on the passage. For Simon, a prophet avoids contact with sinners. For Jesus, a prophet offers costly love to sinners.

The cost is not theoretical. Jesus takes a public insult from his host and then publicly defends a woman with no reputation left to protect, which does his own reputation no good in that room.

Part of a series working through the parables. See also the Pharisee and the tax collector.

Sources

Kenneth E. Bailey, Jesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes: Cultural Studies in the Gospels (IVP Academic, 2008), chapter 18. Supports the reading of the omitted courtesies as a deliberate insult, the point-for-point correspondence between Simon’s omissions and the woman’s actions, the identification of two types of sinner, and the contrast between Simon’s definition of a prophet and Jesus’s. Supplied in full.

Kenneth E. Bailey, Through Peasant Eyes, in Poet and Peasant and Through Peasant Eyes (Eerdmans, 1983), on Luke 7:36-50. Earlier treatment of the same passage. Supplied in full.

The biblical texts cited: Luke 7:36-50.

Where the sourcing stops: the direction of the relationship between forgiveness and love in Luke 7:47 is a genuine translation question, and the argument from the parable’s own logic is the standard resolution rather than a decisive one.

Footnotes

1. The point-for-point correspondence between the three omissions and the three things the woman does is the structure of the scene and it is easy to miss because the list arrives at the end rather than the beginning. Reading the story backwards from Jesus’s summary makes the design obvious.
2. Simon is never rebuked in the way the reader expects. Jesus does not call him a hypocrite or denounce him. He asks him a question, accepts his correct answer, and then describes what happened at his own table. The host is left to draw the conclusion, and Luke does not tell us whether he did.